Snowblind Read Online Free PDF

motherfucker. Only her. She banshees at the blue sky and claps her hands and gets the hell off the top before the snow collapses under her butt to spite her for her hubris.
    The descent is unreasonably long and drops her off far from her basecamp. Hell, the descent was a proud ascent . Until now. She spends the time trying to focus, trying not to daydream. Her methods, her strategy, her luck—they all worked . The people who looked at her and said, you need more margin, you need a partner, you need respect—they were wrong.
    Ann reaches her basecamp tent on the glacier in the middle of the next night. She’s completely fried but still too wired and happy to sleep. When she tries to piece together what all she did on the way down, she can only recover a sense that at times she moved too fast and at other times much too slow. Clouds blew in, right on schedule, covering the mountain and just about everything else. The wind came up. No matter. Here she is. She rolls around in the snow, cackling.
    She picks up her radio. Is it too late to call her pilot? Of course it is! Does she give a shit? No! That old boy dropped her off with a lecture about how much he hated picking up dead climbers. If she has the chance to drag his ass out of bed, she’ll take it. Ann flips on the machine, gets only static, throws it back into her tent, and chucks herself in after. She sleeps through the next afternoon.
    She wakes starving and cooks a huge breakfast out of powdered egg, sugar, and Tabasco. The clouds have gotten organized and are sitting fifty feet overhead, spewing snow. Ann turns on the radio again. Static. She scans the channels. Nothing but static.
    Next day, the snow turns to rain. Wet fog gets in her tent, her lungs, under her skin. The radio speaks nothing but white noise. She swaps batteries, but that’s pointless, right? If she’s getting static, then the damn thing is working. She fiddles all the knobs and gives it a fewdrops, wondering if some key connection has come unmarried and just needs to get wiggled back in place. She feels like a cavewoman trying to fix a toaster oven.
    The weather clears. Ann steps out of her tent. The mountain looks unearthly. Impossible to think she’s just been up there. She hugs herself. Hell, now it is impossible. The snow, the rain, the warm front. The whole face is coming apart, ice falling, avalanches pouring off ledges, white bugs and centipedes jittering all over it.
    Her pilot will know she took advantage of the good window, the three days of cold and clear. Pilots know those sorts of things. When he hasn’t heard from her, he’ll pass by and have a look-see. Won’t he? Sure, or one of his compadres. For all her grumbling and his gruffness, the pilots are a brotherhood of good guys, literal angels to the climbers. What if he’s had a heart attack? One too many fried moose steaks. Someone knows she’s out here, right? That’s a stupid thought—what does it have to do with static all up and down the VHF channels?
    Ann lays out every red piece of clothing she has and stamps PICK UP in twenty-foot letters. Then she cuts a chair for herself in the snow and has a seat. She watches the mountain—she can’t sit through a movie, but she can stare at a mountain for hours—but now she can’t focus. Her brain’s in her ears, listening for that subaudible hum of a distant bushplane. The sky suddenly seems too empty, the air too quiet. Like the world has stopped turning.
    She had been flying high. She has news to share! She can taste the lusciousness of casually dropping the bomb when one of the local hotshots asks where she’s been. Sit back, let the story jump itselffrom Alaska to Colorado to California. She’s crashed now. She’ll probably blab it all out to the first pilot or wildcat miner who gives her a lift. She can feel her chi sinking down through her butt into the glacier.
    Weather rolls back in. Ice. Fog. Heavy